Hello! Apologies if this has been covered elsewhere; I’ve searched the forum but couldn’t find anything concrete.
I’m currently shopping for a new laptop, as my current one is about 6 years old, has already been upgraded, and is still showing its age — it’s nearly time for her to retire, I think
I’m aware that AMD mainboards can’t be thunderbolt certified, but that Thunderbolt 4 is (put very simply) USB-4 with nearly all the optional specs included. I’d imagine Framework will work hard to make sure interoperability with Thunderbolt 4-certified devices is nearly flawless. However, I saw a couple of comments on various forum posts mentioning that the AMD Framework would not have all four expansion ports wired for USB-4. Is that correct? If so, which ports will be designed for which USB specs?
Also, how might this differ from the Intel 13th gen mainboards? Will they have four Thunderbolt 4 ports, or will there be a breakdown similar to the supposed AMD mainboard?
The 13th gen have the full 4 TB4 ports as usual, but the Ryzen 7040 boards have 2 USB4s that should be fully featured for the ports on either side near the hinge, then the front two are USB3.2, with the one next to the heaphone jack having DP alt mode. Believe this is detailed somewhere on the AMDs boards’ product page.
I believe that’s the responsibility of the IOD by AMD, not on Framework’s plate.
What’s on Framework’s plate regarding this is things like ensuring the implementation of power (voltage, current, power states) and signal integrity (e.g. shielding) remain in-spec.
That is a shame and I guess something similar is happening with the Intel motherboards.
I wish they could create the traces and have the possibility of accessing them with some soldering so we could do some “crazy” mods, like somehow getting Oculink in the 13", since the chipset has the capacity.
But having an AMD CPU + AMD GPU might make some things better. Maybe a better reBAR support? Because reBAR is apparently still not working on Windows (as per ReBAR Support - #48 by Jean-Marc_Le_Roux) but it works on Linux…